Being Alone Raises Perils In a Night On the Town

By MICHAEL WILSON

Published: July 28, 2006

A quick look at crime statistics makes it clear enough that much of New York City is at its safest in recent memory. But, as the discovery early yesterday of a dead 18-year-old woman suggests, it is not so safe for a patron drinking in a club or bar late at night in an unfamiliar part of the city -- a situation even more dangerous if the person is alone or ends up that way.

The exact circumstances of the death of the woman, Jennifer Moore, of Harrington Park, N.J., were still being sorted out yesterday, but her final hours were reconstructed enough to suggest that she and a friend left a nightclub in Chelsea heavily intoxicated early Tuesday, the police said. And, denied access to their impounded car, Ms. Moore wandered off alone.

The authorities said they believed that she later accepted a ride or was forced into a stranger's vehicle. Her body was found in a trash bin in West New York, N.J.

Her disappearance came five months after a female graduate student was last seen alive in a bar in SoHo. The student, Imette St. Guillen, 24, had been alone and drinking in the bar, the Falls on Lafayette Street, until closing time. Her naked body was discovered 17 hours later, wrapped in a quilt in a marshy area near the Belt Parkway in eastern Brooklyn. She had been gagged with a sock and bound with plastic ties. A bouncer at the Falls, Darryl Littlejohn, 41, a career criminal, has been charged in the killing.

Other recent cases involve similar circumstances. Last October, a 24-year-old clothing saleswoman from the Bronx, Tabitha Perez, was shot and killed outside Viva, a bar in Washington Heights. She was apparently an unintended target of the shooter, who may not have known her, the police said. Alexander Hall, 21, was charged in late November with killing Ms. Perez and wounding two other men in a shooting spree after a dispute with employees at the bar.

In April, a 21-year-old woman from Newark, Jessica Martinez, was struck and killed by a car while crossing the West Side Highway at 39th Street after leaving a nearby nightclub. She had been walking toward the same New York City impound lot where Ms. Moore was last seen on Tuesday morning, under the same circumstances: to try to reclaim a car that had been towed while she was in a club.

In Ms. Moore's case, she and a friend had walked more than 10 blocks to the lot, so drunk that an ambulance was called to the lot to administer aid to Ms. Moore's friend, the police said.

These recent examples involve women, but men have met similar fates. In a case that received much attention, a college student from New Jersey, Mark Fisher, 19, was killed in 2003 after a night of partying in unfamiliar neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn, ending with him alone among strangers, two of whom were convicted in the robbery and murder.

Alcohol and murder are not newly met. ''About a third of all victims of murders in New York City had alcohol in their blood,'' said Andrew Karmen, a sociology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who has researched the city's homicides and crime rate in recent years. ''About half of all murders involve somebody drinking, the victim or the offender or both.''

Manhattan has been marked by a sharp growth in bars and nightclubs, but a majority of homicides occur in the other boroughs. Shootings on Saturday nights outside nightclubs in poorer neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx remain regular events.

''The drug most implicated with violence is alcohol,'' Professor Karmen said. ''Being under the influence of alcohol has been shown over and over again to heighten the risk of being ether a victim or an offender.''

Photo: Jennifer Moore had planned to start college in the fall. (Photo by Harrington Park Police via Associated Press)